Water scarcity has begun early in India. Corporations and farmers have been guzzling surface water, groundwater levels have been reducing, and the amount of pollutants in water is increasingly rapidly, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute.

While the current situation looks quite grim, there is a possibility that it can get worse. Water supply is expected to fall 50% below demand by 2030.

Few months back I was pushed to stay and work from Pune. It is not that I am not fond of traveling to a place of foreign language. But I was not ready to work from there during that period. When I stayed there I used to take little walk around the city – just to feel it, for every city has got its own heart which I believe is what keeping it alive. And in my routine I came across the bridge constructed over a river -if I am right, river is named as Mula-Mutha river. It was saddening to see the river got polluted from the human wastes.

Suddenly my thoughts went to the two prominent rivers of a Chennai – a city, my home for past 10 years – River Cooum and River Adyar. Is this the fate of rivers in cities of India. I had read and seen pictures of these rivers being used for transportation and key resource for people lived here a few decades before. Why are we polluting them which is quenching our thirst and satisfying our needs, I keep wondering. But I cannot think of a genuine reason of why do we pollute.

We keep hearing that government and corporation will take care of purifying, but never happens. Cleaning the rivers is not a time bound activity and it is a permanent process. The essential thing that should be done in first hand is providing awareness to the people of why these rivers are very much essential to us which later should become a people’s movement. We need our rivers, lakes, ponds and any other form of water resources for our generations to come – to stop the war … The War for Water.